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An approach has been proposed for the description of the dispersion transition of a nonwetting liquid in confinement. This approach describes intrusion and extrusion processes for the ground state of a disordered porous medium, which is characterized by the formation of a fractal percolation cluster. The observed transition of the system of liquid nanoclusters in confinement to a metastable state in a narrow range of degrees of filling and temperatures has been explained by the appearance of a potential barrier owing to fluctuations of the collective "multiparticle interaction" of liquid nanoclusters in neighboring pores of different sizes on the shell of the fractal percolation cluster of filled pores. The energy of the metastable state forms a potential relief in the space of the porous medium with many maxima and minima. The volume of the dispersed liquid in the metastable state has been calculated within the analytical percolation theory for the ground state with the infinite percolation cluster. The extrusion-time distribution function of pores has been calculated. It has been found that the volume of the nonwetting liquid remaining in the porous medium decreases with time according to a power law. Relaxation in the system under study is a multistep process involving discontinuous equilibrium and overcoming of many local maxima of the potential relief. The formation of the metastable state of the trapped nonwetting liquid has been attributed to the nonergodicity of the disordered porous medium. The model reproduces the observed dependence of the volume of the dispersed liquid both on the degree of filling and on the temperature.

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Correlation effects arising during liquid infiltration into hydrophobic porous medium are considered. On the basis of these effects a mechanism of energy absorption at filling porous medium by nonwetting liquid is suggested. In accordance with this mechanism, the absorption of mechanical energy is a result expenditure of energy for the formation of menisci in the pores on the shell of the infinite cluster and expenditure of energy for the formation of liquidporous medium interface in the pores belonging to the infinite cluster of filled pores. It was found that in dependences on the porosity and, consequently, in dependences on the number of filled pores neighbors, the thermal effect of filling can be either positive or negative and the cycle of infiltration-defiltration can be closed with full outflow of liquid. It can occur under certain relation between percolation properties of porous medium and the energy characteristics of the liquid-porous medium interface and the liquid-gas interface. It is shown that a consecutive account of these correlation effects and percolation properties of the pores space during infiltration allow to describe all experimental data under discussion.

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Anomalously slow relaxation of clusters of a liquid confined in a disordered system of pores has been studied for the (water-L23 nanoporous medium) system. The evolution of the system of confined liquid clusters consists of a fast formation stage followed by slow relaxation of the system and its decay. The characteristic time for the formation of the initial state is τ(p)∼10 s after the reduction of excess pressure after complete filling. Anomalously slow relaxation has been observed for times of 10(1)-10(5) s, and decay has been observed at times of >10(5) s. The time dependence of the volume fraction θ of pores filled with the confined liquid is described by a power law θ∼t(-α) with the exponent α<0.15. The exponent α and temperature dependence α(T) are qualitatively described theoretically for the case of a slightly polydisperse medium in a mean-field approximation with the inclusion of the interaction of liquid clusters and averaging over various degenerate local configurations of clusters. In this approximation, slow relaxation is represented as a continuous transition through a sequence of metastable states of the system of clusters with a decreasing barrier.

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